Under the Fir Tree

I didn't expect to meet him again tonight. It was only a highway, only another small town in western Oregon—blink and you miss it, the kind of place where the mill once was the center. But as I drove past, the old sign with the town’s name flared in my headlights, and for a moment I was twenty-something again, a seminarian with a borrowed car and a worn breviary, sent here for a summer to “help the pastor.” In a town this small, every sorrow’s got an address, and the fields lean into the mist like parishioners who’ve run out of words. I went believing I was bringing something—maybe clarity, maybe courage, the right sentences, the clean procedure of something  I  had to offer. I didn’t yet know ministry isn’t a delivery. It’s a vigil. The pastor's voice from those decades ago echoed: “There’s a man who needs to talk. He doesn’t come around much. Why don’t you go?” So I went. He lived alone in a small house set back from the road, as though it'd taken one step away from the e...

Why did the Creed-makers bother to plant this line in our mouths: “ I believe in the forgiveness of sins ”? Isn’t that obvious—like saying, “I believe water is wet”? Not quite. Belief here doesn’t mean “I agree in theory.” It means “I live as if it’s true.” And forgiveness doesn’t mean “brushing it off.” It means “the debt is real, and I release it.” An excuse says: “It wasn’t really my fault.” Forgiveness says: “It was my fault—and we can be reconciled.” That’s why the clause needs repeating. It’s the sort of truth that tarnishes fast unless you keep polishing it. Here’s the hard edge of it: we say God forgives sins—and we also say He won’t forgive us unless we forgive others. That isn’t a side note or a special case. It’s in the Lord’s Prayer, and Jesus states it plainly: if you don’t forgive, you won’t be forgiven . No footnotes. No “unless it was really bad.” No “unless they did it again.” And that’s where we start to squirm. Because we often make the same mistake in two direct...

They’ve taught us a new chastity, and it’s not holy. It’s the chastity of the sealed heart—clean, efficient, disinfected of need. They call it “boundaries,” “self-possession,” “not getting attached,” as if love were a stain you can scrub out with the right product and a little discipline. But you can smell the lie on it, sharp as alcohol on a wound: it isn’t purity, it’s fear pretending to be wisdom. A man’ll say he wants peace, and what he means is he wants nobody to reach him. A woman’ll say she’s protecting her heart, and what she’s protecting is her loneliness—the last possession the world can’t take because she’s already handed it to herself. We live like tenants in our own souls, moving quietly so nothing creaks, keeping the lamps low, pretending we don’t hear the footsteps upstairs. We’ve made a virtue of not being claimed. But love claims. Love always claims. Even the smallest love—the dumb, faithful love of a dog, the stubborn love of a child who falls asleep with their fist a...

Forgiveness isn’t just a virtue. It’s how being overflows—quietly, freely, insistent. It comes before justice, not after it; a yes buried beneath the ought. The gratuity that precedes the good. You can resist it. But resistance cuts—to resist forgiveness isn't neutral. It’s a wound within the gift, a contraction within the openness of the given. To forgive isn’t simply to act morally, but to dwell more deeply in how being gives. It’s metaphysical sanity: to move with the grain of how life gives itself. God gives being. Still. Again. And again. We shrink back, we refuse—and still we’re held. Even our recoil is carried. Sin isn’t merely a transgression; it’s closing the door, folding inward, forgetting the other who gave us breath. So forgiveness isn’t just letting go. It’s letting in. A breath between —soul to soul, self to other, finite to infinite. Withhold forgiveness, and you don’t just harden—you sever the branch you’re standing on. It’s more than cruelty; it’s collapse. The wo...